Bouncing data would speed up data center

Technology Review (Dec 20 2011)

1. Inside the huge data centers operated by Internet companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, information is processed at blistering speed, but it still has to be moved between different machines through relatively slow wiring. In theory, this bottleneck could be avoided by adding wired links between racks, but that would be very expensive and, short of a complete architectural redesign, not particularly practical. Transmitting data wirelessly would be simpler, but achieving the required speed would normally require a line-of-sight connection, which is impossible in a packed data center. Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Intel's labs in Oregon have come up with a clever solution: bouncing wireless signals off the ceiling, which they say could boost data transmission speeds by 30 percent. Congestion caused by short bursts of activity inside data centers is a growing problem, says Heather Zheng, an associate professor of computer science at ... (Read Full Article)

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